American Graduate announces winners of spoken-word competition

By |September 24, 2014

Judges and the public have selected five winners of American Graduate’s Raise Up hip-hop and spoken word competition, which asked students to share original poems about challenges that lead students to drop out of high school.

The winners will perform their poems live Sunday at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., at an event hosted by Glynn Washington, host and e.p. of public radio’s Snap Judgment. Each winner will also receive a $5,000 scholarship from the Will and Jada Smith Family Foundation.

Their entries, available online, offer a variety of perspectives on the challenges and opportunities that students face. In her poem “Nine Faces,” Lee talks about going to Central High School in Little Rock and being inspired by the Little Rock Nine, the African-American students who famously desegregated the school in 1957.

Ross’s poem focuses on the run-down condition of her schools and her teachers’ preconceptions that students from lower-income areas will achieve less in the classroom.

“I am not challenged because they see little potential in someone like me,” Ross says.

Representatives from both CPB and Youth Speaks say they hope that the Raise Up competition will become a regular part of American Graduate.

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American Graduate and Youth Speaks, a nonprofit that focuses on empowering youth through creativity, hope to include more young people in conversations about high-school dropout rates with Raise Up, a hip-hop and spoken-word contest that will culminate with a performance this month at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and a radio special. The organizations paired up this spring to encourage teens to submit original raps and poems related to the high school dropout crisis.

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